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...display was appreciated by many, but some found it hard not to wonder what will happen after the police go back to their day jobs. On TV, the usual cast of security experts roundly lamented insufficient funds for mass-transit security. Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware vowed to introduce a bill that would add $1.1 billion in new money and "make everybody stand up and be counted on it, goddammit." But without pausing for breath, everyone agreed there is really no way to prevent an attack from happening here. "Surface transportation is a killing ground," says Brian Michael Jenkins...
Since the 1995 sarin-gas attacks in the Tokyo subway and the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, some U.S. cities have quietly made smart improvements to their transit systems. Hundreds of police are now equipped with handheld radiation detectors. They do flag the occasional chemotherapy patient, leading to at least a couple of unfortunate strip searches in New York City, but that means the devices are working...
Most counterterrorism experts don't think high-tech bomb-detection solutions will ever work for public transit. Trains and buses are useful precisely because they are convenient, fast and cheap--and therefore hard to secure. That's why the oft repeated complaint that the government spends far more on aviation security than on transit is a bit of an oversimplification. It's true that the Feds have spent $18 billion on protecting planes and only $250 million exclusively on transit since 9/11. But that's partly because aviation is much easier to secure. And it's also because local officials...
...priorities for protecting the nation's transport system--something Chertoff's department has not yet made clear. "That kind of road map is still missing out of Washington," says Daniel Prieto, research director of the Homeland Security Partnership Initiative at Harvard University. Sixteen times as many Americans take public transit every day as take planes. Does that mean the spending ought to shift to those riders? On Dec. 31, the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to provide Congress with a strategic plan for transit security that would guide budget decisions. Six months have gone by, and still no plan...
...meantime, says Tom Kelly, spokesman for New York City's transit system, it's a constant struggle to steer clear of expensive gadgetry that doesn't work. For example: "One of the first things everybody said after 9/11 is that you have to run out and buy those bomb-resistant wastebaskets [for subway platforms]," says Kelly. "But then you realize that the blast goes up. So somebody on the platform wouldn't die, but somebody on the sidewalk above would...